No woman needs to go through what I did

She was 19 when a family friend, a pastor, raped her. On that harrowing evening 16 years ago, Sarah Omega had accompanied a neighbour to the shopping center, to buy a bottle of soda.

A few meters from the gate, this neighbour, a young woman, stopped to talk to two men who she seemed to know.

Sarah walked ahead, while the three followed a few steps behind. By the time they got to the shopping center, all the shops were closed, so they decided to try a nearby bar.

“We had to pass through a narrow path lined with rental houses to get there. Suddenly, someone pushed me through one of the open doors, which was quickly shut as I fell inside,” she recalls. Sarah says that inside was this pastor, a married father of two.

“When he pinned me down, I struggled, and tried to scream, but he was too strong for me,” she continues. When she came to the following morning, he was gone, and she was in terrible pain, with blood stains on her clothes.

“I had never been sexually intimate, and even though I knew that what this man had done to me was very wrong, I feared to tell anyone about it, including my elder sister, who I lived with,” she narrates.

The last thing that Sarah would have expected to be the outcome of the rape was pregnancy, but that is exactly what happened.

“When my sister pressed me to reveal the responsible person, I lied and said that it was a boy I knew – the man who raped me was very close to our family, and I just didn’t know how to reveal what he had done to me,” she says.

When she went into labour five months later, Sarah was unable to give birth normally. Doctors performed an emergency operation, but the baby was already dead.

Three days later, what would turn out to be a relentless 12-year nightmare for this 35 year old woman begun. “I could no longer control urine – it just oozed, and there was nothing I could about it,” Sarah recalls.

She was admitted to hospital for two months, but the doctors could not rectify her mysterious condition.

At one point, she overheard some nurses say that her problem could only be treated by “doctors from abroad.” This statement, she says, distressed her so much; she could barely sleep at night.

When she was discharged, Sarah returned to her elder sister’s home, Jane Omega, whom she says has always been the family’s pillar.

“When our parents died in the late eighties, being the eldest, she’s the one who took care of the eight of us,” she explains.

Sarah, who had been outgoing, started to keep to herself – she dared not visit friends or relatives, just in case they got to know about her “embarrassing” condition.

She did not go beyond primary school, since her sister couldn’t’ afford to pay school fees for all of them. To lighten her sister’s load, she got a job as a house girl in Eldoret town, in 2000.

“I had devised a way to keep my problem hidden. I bought several towels and cut them into small pieces which I would change after every 30 minutes, to prevent the urine from leaking,” Sarah says. Since she could not afford sanitary pads, she would later wash and dry them for reuse.

One day however, her employer’s daughter stumbled on the pieces of cloth, which she took to her mother.